


In which Beacon is really bad at making friends

by ivyness



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: A closet, Destiny, Episode 19, Gen, Goddamn pixies, Pixies, Teenagers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 05:25:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17677229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyness/pseuds/ivyness
Summary: Everyone says no to Beacon. (Except the goddamn pixie)





	In which Beacon is really bad at making friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Panny](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Panny/gifts).



> Bit of a warning for isolation. It's canon, though, that Duck leaves Beacon with Ned for like 20 years.  
> SPOILERS through episode 19  
> Also, sorry this is more Beacon-centric than I expected

Duck steps outside, just in time to see a cab pull off into the distance, getting off the main drab and onto the highway out of town. Several feet away from the entrance of the mall, there’s a grassy little cut-out in the sidewalk where a tree is growing in the middle of the town. There’s a few of them peppered across the main drag, giving the downtown area of Kepler a bit of greenery. But in this patch of grass there is a shape glistening in the moonlight. It is a sword. It is a long, straight, thin blade with a leather bound hilt, and an intricately formed guard which appears in the shape of a mouth. 

And Minerva suddenly disappears and reappears in front of the blade and gestures towards it and says, “I know your hesitance, Duck Newton! You have voiced it clearly, and I would not dain to ignore it. But you have been chosen, Duck, and that is a decision that cannot be reversed. I ask of you this, take up your blade, take up your fated instrument. And if you do not feel the call to pursue your destiny, I shall take my leave until you have grown to accept the tasks appointed to you.”

Duck nervously laughs. “Well, I am of course honored, uh, I mean I’ll keep the sword! It seems kind of dumb to me but I’ll keep the sword.” Duck pulls the sword free from the ground, hefting it in his hand and swinging it carelessly in wide, swooping arcs. “Oh wow, this is pretty kick-ass, yeah! I mean I’m not gonna go like, stab Dracula or whatever the fuck, but it’s alright.”

Minerva looks painfully earnest as she says, “But you could! You have the power to stab, you said Dracula?”

The sword hums in Duck’s hand and he looks down to see the guard rip open, blood-red lips twisting into an unpleasant smirk as a drawling voice says, “Minerva, instruct this beef boy to unhand me, please.”

Duck drops it on the ground and jumps a hasty step back. “What the fuck.”

“Oh, excellent!” The sword has an unpleasant, metallic voice and an uncanny resemblance to Tim Curry. “Another skilled combatant.”

*****

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Come now, what is it you meat bags like to say? ‘Fake it till you make it, and if you can’t fake it, then die,’” Beacon says with a sharp grin.

They’re sitting in Duck’s closet. Dirty laundry lies like mountains on the floor. Skateboards and fraying shoes, plastic trucks and stuffed animals, remnants of childhood leisure poke haphazardly from the piles of clothes. And then there’s Beacon. The sword stands high on a pedestal of books, shredded clothes littered around its base, forming a soft nest for Beacon to rest against.

A hanger digs unpleasantly into Duck’s back. “I’m pretty sure that’s not how the saying goes.”

“Of course not. I am, after all, a sword.” If Beacon had eyes they would be rolling.

“Look. I can’t just take you out and start swinging you around in the backyard. For one, ma will kill me if I step on her petunias and for another you’re a goddamned talking sword and I ain’t about to let you eat any of my friends,” Duck says, trying to push the hanger out of the way of his kidneys.

Beacon hums, a tinny rasp that sends shivers up Duck’s spine. “Far be it from me to tell you what to do, but if you don’t find a way to make up for your lack of...physical talents…well it’s not as if I can swing myself.”

“Well that’s not fucking ominous.”

Beacon’s grin is blood red.

“But I mean. Sure there’s like a potential threat and all that jazz out there,” Duck says, waving his hand vaguely towards the window. “But I still gotta pass algebra. Ma will definitely murder me, no if's, and's, or but's about it if I don’t pass and she’s the one I gotta live with.”

Beacon’s frown is downright murderous but he can’t, after all, swing himself.

*****

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Well, there’s no need to be such a baby about it,” Beacon drawls. “I’m not asking you to kill him, not even a well-deserved maiming. The child practically pees his pants when the furnace kicks on. A good jump scare, maybe a little kidnapping, and he’ll come running back, begging to learn how to fight.

Leo Tarkesian, Beacon’s former ham-fisted wielder, looks back at the sword in exasperation. “Beacon you absolute menace, you said it was an emergency. I can’t believe I broke into Mrs. Newton’s house for this.”

Beacon curls and uncurls its blade, cutting careless lines into the closet wall. Leo hadn’t bothered squeezing into the tight space. He’s leaning against the closet door, his bad knee held out straight, shoulders stooped, and hair greyer than when Beacon had last seen him. “He put me in his closet.”

Leo rolls his eyes, “Yes. I can see that.”

“Leo Tarkesian. That gorilla put me in a  _ closet _ . I live on top of his dirty socks.”

“I still don’t see how this warrants a kidnapping,” Leo says.

“Do you know what it is like to sleep on a pile sweaty socks? I started hallucinating, talking to the beanie babies, I  _ named _ that green monstrosity!”

Leo leans into the closet to get a better look, and indeed, there is a worn looking stuffed dinosaur, pale and lumpy with a distinctly unimpressed expression on its jaws. Next to it is a pink and blue teddy bear, a plastic racecar, and a doll with a mini skateboard tucked under its arm. They stand in a ring like sycophants around Beacon’s pedestal.

Leo leans back against the closet door and crosses his arms, “Seems like you’re having fun.”

“That is not the point,” Beacon hisses, “I am a weapon of magic, torn from grips of a black hole, forged in the heat of a dying star, built in the beginning to usher in the end. I am The Light That Stands At The Edge Of The Darkness, The Tower Above The Fog. I am Beacon! And I will not be relegating by a bumbling wackadoodle!”

Leo smiles fondly down at Beacon and says, “I’m still not traumatizing Duck for you.”

Beacon screeches at him, the sound like a chainsaw on nails.

*****

“Nah. Abs’lutely nah,” squeeks a thin, high pitched voice.

Beacon’s patience is wearing thin. Never so often in its millennia of existence has it been so repeatedly denied. It doesn’t help that on a normal day, pixies were dusty, feather-brained termites, this one, after being stuck for seventy two hours on a strip of fly trap, was downright vicious. Beacon would have been slightly impressed if the glittery termite hadn’t bitten the ear off of Albert, The-Teddy-Bear-of-the-Eastern-Sweatshirt.

“You haven’t even heard the terms,” Beacon says.

The pixie gave Beacon a skeptical once over. “Yas don’ got nah.”

If Beacon had a brain it would have had a headache. Luckily, it doesn’t have a brain, because clearly brains turned all fleshies into morons.

“You have gotten yourself into a predicament you can not get yourself out of and I am offering to free you. For a price, of course,” Beacon says, curling it’s blade in a tight, impatient coil. This has to work. Beacon doesn’t have any other options.

The pixie sniffs disdainfully, “Yas think ‘m one of ‘em fae?” 

The pixie was an unearthly blue, its large, translucent wings shimmered like glass, and a halo of pixie dust caught the light in a flare of rainbows. They wore a t-shirt that said “Pixie on someone your own size”.

“Don’t be absurd, of course you’re not of the fae but for my purposes you will be sufficient,” Beacon says.

“Sufficin’! Now yas look on here yer addle brain’d paper shredder,” the pixie says as Beacon straightens up in affront, “I don’ gotta take insult from a magic knife playin’ dress up dolly and tea times in a cupboard fulla socks. I don’ gotta deal.” The pixie growls viciously around a mouthful of razor sharp teeth.

Beacon purposely straightens to its full height, towering and just as deadly sharp as a pixie’s bite. “Look. You go find Duck Newton and make a nuisance of yourself and in exchange I will free you from this fly trap. Are we in agreement? Otherwise I’d be happy to leave you here to rot, gloating over your stinking corpse." 

Abruptly the pixie’s angry posturing falls away. “Deal,” they say, and Beacon pauses at this abrupt reversal. Beacon can’t help but feel like its missed something. But a deal’s a deal and it has no choice but to uncoil its blade and cut the knat free.

*****

“No, no, no, absolutely not, this can’t be happening.”

Beacon doesn’t know what to say in response to that because clearly it is, indeed, happening. Goddamn pixies.

“I can assure you this was not my doing,” Beacon says, lying through its metal teeth.

Duck throws up his hands in exasperation, “Then who was it? Pixies!?”

Beacon doesn’t bother answering because yes, it was goddamn pixies not knowing the goddamn definition of ‘nuisance’ or ‘restraint’ and Beacon is not in the mood to explain this again.

“Oh god they’re going to kill me,” Duck says, pulling at his hair in panic, “They’re going to string me up by my toes and drown me in honey for a slow, agonizing death.”

“While normally I approve of the dramatics, this is a tad excessive.”

“You ripped off the head of the town center’s bear statue, ruined my best bud’s field hockey gear, stole the Hornet’s jackets, and ripped out my ma’s petunias, and somehow decided with all you magical genius for ruining my life, decided to stuff it All. In. My. Closet!”

“Then it clearly wasn’t me. Your closet is cramped enough without filling it with other meat-sicles’ junk.”

“Beacon,” Duck says, looking devastated, and Beacon refuses to be guilted into caring for something that’s not his fault, “You set fire to the trees. The Monongahela forest is  _ burning _ .”

From his perch, Beacon can just make out the haze of grey smothering the sky outside Duck’s window. Goddamn pixies.

“Grow up! You think this is bad? This is nothing,” Beacon hisses, “You were chosen, Duck Newton. You were chosen and the strongest magical artifact in all existence was given into your possession and you  _ put me in a closet _ .” The ringing of Beacon’s harsh, angry breathes is the only sound between them. “Destiny will come for you whether you are ready or not, but if you are not ready then you will be trampled down while the oceans burn and your world turns to ash.”

Duck is silent. Smoke curls in around the edges of his bedroom window and it makes the air feel sharp and gritty, the smell of a burning world.

Duck picks up Beacon by the hilt and heads for the door. Beacon grins, viciously triumphant.

*****

“No. Absolutely not.”

“C’mon Ned, I promise it’s not that bad,” Duck says, lying through his teeth. 

Beacon shrieks, an ear-piercing sound that the box barely muffles as it tries to force its way out. Beacon coils and uncoils it’s blade, ripping up the cushion but barely making a scratch in the hardened wood. It can’t get enough leverage. Beacon is the strongest sword in the universe but it can’t swing itself.

Ned looks at the rattling box skeptically. 

Duck laughs nervously, his eyes darting left and right. “Oh, you know technology these days. Us rowdy kids sure know how to run on the grass, uh, and robots they, you know, do the thing,” Duck flaps his hands around meaninglessly.

That’s the worst misdirection Ned has ever seen and he winces in sympathy. “Alright, young Duck, I’ll take the, uh,  _ robot _ off your hands. At the very least, it’ll  make a curious attraction at the Cryptonomica.”

“Yeah,” Duck says, nervously, “Actually, I think it would be safer for the, uh, robot, to you know, stay in the box. With the locks locked. And the wood, uh, wooded.”

“Sure, Duck, whatever you say,” says Ned, fingers crossed behind his back.

Beacon curls into a tight coil and pretends like it can’t hear every word they’re saying.

*****

“Oh wow, hello there. Do you need something to eat? You want a coke or something?” asks Ned. 

“I feed off of the magical energies of all living creatures around me,” says Beacon, his grin particularly sharp, “You taste like I assume coke does: overly sweet and temporarily enjoyable but ultimately pointless and if consumed in large doses, nauseating.”

“So...you’re eating me?”

“Oh you are so terribly clever.”

“Right then. I’m just gonna,” Ned says and closes the lid of the box. And locks the locks.

“Coward,” Beacon whispers to himself. “Cowards, the lot of them.”

Destiny will come for Duck Newton whether he is ready or not. After all, it is a beacon, a herald of the end times. Beacon closes its eyes and basks in the ebb and flow of this planet’s magical currents, it closes its eyes and sleeps, and dreams of a warm hand on its hilt.


End file.
